Chapter 1 — Tollan: The Paradise That May Not Have Existed

The Aztec sources describe Tollan as a paradise on earth.

The accounts survive in several colonial-era documents, written down in the decades after the Spanish conquest by indigenous scribes and Spanish friars working together to preserve pre-conquest knowledge. The most important is the Florentine Codex, compiled by the Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagun (sah-ah-GOON) between the 1540s and 1570s, based on interviews with Aztec elders who remembered the old traditions. The Florentine Codex is a massive work -- twelve books, covering every aspect of Aztec life, from religion to natural history to daily customs. Its account of the Toltecs is vivid and specific.

In Tollan, the codex says, the Toltecs grew cotton that came out of the ground already colored -- amaranth red, yellow, violet, blue-green, azure, orange, tawny, brown, and coyote-colored. These colors were natural, not dyed. The Toltecs did not need to apply pigments because the cotton itself grew in every shade. Corn was so abundant and the ears so enormous that short ears were used as fuel for the fires -- they were burned as firewood, too plentiful to bother eating. Squashes were so large that a man could barely put his arms around one. Amaranth plants grew as tall as trees, and people climbed them like trees to harvest the grain.

The Toltec artisans, the codex continues, were masters of every craft. They invented the art of featherwork -- the creation of mosaics and garments from brilliantly colored tropical bird feathers, an art form that the Aztecs considered the highest form of artistic expression. They were the first jade carvers, the first metalworkers, the first painters, the first astronomers. They knew the movements of the stars and the calendar. They built houses of jade and turquoise and quetzal feathers. Everything beautiful in the world had been made first by the Toltecs, and everyone who came after them was merely imitating their achievements.

This is propaganda. It is magnificent propaganda, vivid and memorable and politically effective, but it is propaganda nonetheless.

The Aztecs -- more properly called the Mexica (meh-SHEE-kah) -- arrived in the Valley of Mexico in the thirteenth century as a small, marginal group with no particular claim to authority. They settled on an island in Lake Texcoco (tesh-KOH-koh) and built their capital, Tenochtitlan (teh-nohch-TEE-tlahn), around 1325 CE. Within two centuries they had conquered an empire that stretched from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific, from central Mexico to the borders of present-day Guatemala. It was one of the most rapid imperial expansions in the history of the Americas.

But rapid expansion creates a legitimacy problem. A ruling dynasty needs a pedigree. It needs to demonstrate that its right to rule is ancient, not improvised. Throughout Mesoamerican history, the solution to this problem was the same: claim descent from the Toltecs. The Aztec royal families traced their genealogies back to Toltec rulers. The city-states of the Valley of Mexico competed to establish the most convincing Toltec pedigree. To marry a woman of Toltec descent was to acquire legitimacy. To claim a Toltec ancestor was to claim the mantle of civilization itself.

The result is that virtually everything we know about the Toltecs comes from sources produced by people who had a political stake in how the Toltecs were remembered. The Aztec accounts are not disinterested history. They are origin stories told by an empire that needed the Toltecs to have been glorious, because the Aztecs' own legitimacy depended on inheriting that glory.

The legendary city of Tollan as described in Aztec sources

The Annals of Cuauhtitlan (kwow-TEE-tlahn), another colonial-era source compiled from pre-conquest oral traditions, provides a somewhat different account of Toltec history -- more focused on political events, less on the paradise motif, but equally shaped by the political concerns of the communities that preserved the traditions. The Historia Tolteca-Chichimeca, a mid-sixteenth-century document from Cuauhtinchan (kwow-TEEN-chahn) in Puebla, tells the story of the Toltec-Chichimec migration and the founding of new communities after Tula's fall. Each of these sources has its own biases, its own agenda, and its own relationship to the Toltec past. None is a neutral record.

The historian Nigel Davies, who spent decades working through these contradictory sources, described the problem in his 1977 book The Toltecs Until the Fall of Tula: the sources do not agree with each other, they contain chronological impossibilities, they mix historical figures with gods, and they were compiled centuries after the events they describe. Separating historical fact from political mythology in the Toltec sources is, Davies concluded, one of the most difficult problems in Mesoamerican history.

The word "Toltec" itself carries the weight of this mythology. In Nahuatl, toltecatl means both "person from Tollan" and "artisan" or "master craftsman." The dual meaning is not an accident. The Aztecs so thoroughly identified the Toltecs with artistic excellence that the name of the people became the name of the skill. A skilled featherworker was a toltecatl. A master sculptor was a toltecatl. The word embedded the assumption that all good craft originated with the Toltecs -- that to be skilled was to be, in some essential way, Toltec.

This linguistic fusion of identity and excellence made the Toltecs impossible to evaluate objectively. If "Toltec" means "master artisan," then by definition the Toltecs were master artisans. The mythology is built into the vocabulary. Every time a Nahuatl speaker used the word toltecatl to describe a skilled craftsman, they were reinforcing the idea that the Toltecs had been the original masters -- whether or not the historical Toltecs were actually more skilled than their contemporaries.

The concept of "Tollan" adds another layer of complexity. Alfredo Lopez Austin and Leonardo Lopez Lujan (leh-oh-NAHR-doh LOH-pehs loo-HAHN) have argued that "Tollan" was not simply the name of one city -- it was a title, a concept, a category. In Mesoamerican political thought, a tollan was any great city, any place of civilization and artistry. Teotihuacan was a Tollan. Cholula was a Tollan. Chichen Itza was a Tollan. The word meant something like "Place of Reeds" -- reeds being a metaphor for densely packed people, a great gathering, a city. When the Aztec sources describe Tollan as the origin of civilization, they may be describing not a specific city but a concept -- the idea of the great city itself, the archetypal metropolis from which all civilized life flows. The archaeological site of Tula may be one incarnation of this concept, perhaps the most recent before the Aztecs, but not necessarily the original or the greatest.

If Lopez Austin is right, the gap between legend and archaeology becomes more understandable. The Aztec sources are not describing Tula; they are describing an ideal -- the Platonic form of the great city, projected backward onto a real but imperfect place. The Toltecs are not a people so much as a concept: the idea that somewhere in the past there existed a civilization so perfect that all subsequent civilizations are mere shadows of it. The concept served the Aztecs politically -- it gave them a standard to aspire to and an ancestry to claim -- but it was never meant to be a factual description of one particular archaeological site.